TV CRIMEDUSTERS.(producers of 'C.S.I: Crime Scene Investigation')(Brief Article)(Interview)

Carol Mendelsohn was changing her shoes in the limo. "I don't know how many shoes I've ruined at crime scenes," she said, as she stowed her Robert Clergerie flats and put on a pair of nineteen-dollar Lady Foot Locker sneakers. "I've run through so many pairs of Pradas," Ann Donahue said. Anthony Zuiker looked down at his own Armani slippers and crossed his legs complacently.

Mendelsohn, Donahue, and Zuiker are the executive producers of CBS's "C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation," the top-rated drama on television. The show improbably romanticizes the grubby world of forensics: its Las Vegas-based investigators decant Luminol onto a victim's carpet as if it were Chateau Lafite. The producers were in Manhattan for a few days recently to announce a spinoff for the fall--"C.S.I.: Miami," starring David Caruso--and, having the morning free, they were heading to Queens to visit the N.Y.P.D. Crime Lab. "In Vegas the investigators we went around with were so serious," Zuiker said.

"But on our ride-along in Miami," Donahue said, "we saw a guy who'd been dead for three days, naked on his bed with porn playing on the TV, and he was swollen up like Gulliver. First thing the cop did was light a big Cuban cigar to cover the smell."

"The guy was so bloated they shouted, 'Stand back for the piercing!' " Zuiker said. "Then they stabbed his abdomen to release the gases. It was a rocking good time."

At the Forensic Investigations Division on Jamaica Avenue, the producers were met by Dan Austin, a crime-scene and evidence technician. Detective Austin, whose shirt pocket bulged with three pens and a pack of Marlboros, showed them his crisply drawn map of a 1994 shootout in which Wen Ping-Hsu, a Taiwanese Green Beret, took on a squadron of cops. "The individual, who was not a nice individual, had killed his landlord, unbeknownst to anybody, and then he blew his landlord's wife away in front of a congressman here"--Austin stabbed an index finger at the map--"engaged in a shootout with cops, striking two bystanders here and here"--stab, stab--"shot a bystander in the head here, shot an officer in the leg here (an officer who is now walking around with a prosthetic leg), and then engaged in a raging gun battle in the parking garage here. The cops were tossing each other clips and off-duty pieces, trying to skip bullets under cars to get him. What stopped the individual, finally, were .38-calibre bullets, twenty-five of them, that the M.E. dug out of his body, which fell"--heavy stab--"here. Over four hundred and seventy-five pieces of ballistic evidence. We had so many overlays on our map it was incredible."

"Last year," Mendelsohn said, "Ann wrote an episode called 'Blood Drops' that ...